At its worst, it was an aggressive bombardment of off-putting funk, too slick and self-satisfied in its quest to titillate and nauseate as many people as possible.
At its best, as in “American Horror Story: Asylum,” a season that closely resembles “Ratched” ’s subject matter and in which Paulson played a plucky journalist, the formula was an intriguing carnival sideshow of gross and garish delights, depending on your tolerance for masturbation and mutilation. “Horror Story” consistently tried to push the boundaries of what a show could present on cable television. What she confesses about her childhood, without giving too much away, is classic Murphy, a grisly story of sexual abuse and violence that could have been pulled directly from the shock-and-saw playbook of his macabre “American Horror Story” anthology franchise. What you learn, through these several retellings, is that Ratched was an orphan who bounced around the foster system, alongside a boy whom she considered to be her brother, until the pair landed in a particularly twisted family. In fact, it hits you over the head with the inciting incident: first in multiple flashbacks, then in the form of a marionette show, and then, finally, in a maudlin monologue in which Paulson divulges her deepest trauma, lest the viewer remain confused. “Ratched” is not subtle about what caused the rot at the core of its protagonist. There was not always a worm inside the apple.
The idea behind these projects tends to follow a formula: this woman wasn’t always a monster, a harpy, a shrew. But only recently has the genre expanded to include reviled female characters Disney’s “Maleficent” franchise, for example, or the upcoming “Cruella de Vil” film, starring Emma Stone. The rise-of-the-antihero genre is an old trope, going back to special editions of comic books that would explain Lex Luthor’s bloodlust or the childhood neglect at the heart of the Joker’s nihilism. The series, which Netflix ordered for two seasons upfront, intends to follow Mildred over the course of two decades, beginning in the nineteen-forties (the first season only gets so far as a few months according to Paulson, Randle McMurphy might not surface until Season 4). “Ratched,” starring Murphy’s frequent collaborator Sarah Paulson in the titular role, is an origin story, the making of a villainess. But did a caricature as crude as Mildred Ratched need to be reclaimed? And to what purpose? These are the questions I found myself asking as I sat through eight hour-long episodes of “ Ratched,” a new Netflix drama created by Evan Romansky and produced by Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy as part of Murphy’s gargantuan Netflix development deal. Ratched, whom Kesey described in one interview as a “big castrator of a nurse,” is seen as the mean mommy to Jack Nicholson’s merry prankster Randle McMurphy, the block of ice standing between him and a good time. In retrospect, both Kesey and Forman’s characterizations of Nurse Ratched-as the frigid embodiment of an institutional femininity that serves to both neuter and negate men’s wily impulses-were shaped by the snickering machismo of their times. I asked why he didn’t take pictures of me and he said, ‘You’re so boring, always in that white uniform.’ ” “The still photographer kept taking pictures of all the crazies and putting them up in the hospital dining room. They were so free, and I had to be so controlled,” she told the Times in a 1975 interview.
Fletcher, for her part, said she found the role of Ratched (which earned her an Oscar for Best Actress) to be terribly opaque and difficult to play. The role ultimately went to Louise Fletcher, a lesser-known actress whose most prominent work was in television Westerns a decade before. When the director Milos Forman was casting his 1975 film adaptation of the book, he initially struggled to find an actress to take on Ratched-Anne Bancroft, Angela Lansbury, Geraldine Page, Colleen Dewhurst, and Ellen Burstyn turned the role down, considering the character to be too maniacal and unfeeling. But, as Kesey later admitted, he greatly exaggerated the woman’s cruelty in his story for theatrical effect, twisting her into a symbol of autocratic control and blithe barbarism, who takes quiet pleasure in torturing her patients through a combination of medicinal control and psychological manipulation. The novelist Ken Kesey based the character of Nurse Ratched, the villain of his 1962 novel, “ One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” on a real person-a nurse whom he once met while working the night shift in a psychiatric facility in Oregon.